Hillbilly Myth-elegy?

by Croak

A propos of Ribbit’s last post comes a nice piece by Rick Perlstein in Mother Jones, which paints a nuanced, albeit largely anecdotal, portrait of the plight of poor rural communities.

At first, I was somewhat taken by the poor rural voter narrative that coursed through the internet in the run-up to the election.  This narrative was probably best illustrated by David Wong’s piece at Cracked.com.  And while I agree with much of Wong’s story, his portrayal of city people as derisive villains is just as prejudicial as everything he accuses them of.  Yes, if one sifts through enough Twitter feeds or comments under HuffPo articles, you can find the mocking tone that Wong insinuates, but what if we were to perform the same extrapolation using comments from Breitbart or the Drudge Report?  Is it fair to characterize an entire sector of people based on the internet postings of a few?

It’s not difficult to hold these two thoughts together: Trump has some voters who are deplorable misogynistic racists, but not all Trump voters are misogynists and racists.  It’s simple grade school logic, and most people I know don’t struggle with it.  Similarly, some wealthy cityfolk are arrogant and contemptuous pricks who see rural people as racist rubes, but that obviously does not describe the attitude of all or even the majority of city denizens.

Nevertheless, Wong effictively highlights the dire economic reality of much of rural America, and I don’t doubt him.  But can the same not be said of inner city America?  How about once thriving suburban areas surrounding crumbling cities like Detroit?  I understand that some of Wong’s piece is written using an ironic mask, one that tries to read the shifting sands of a new technological world through the eyeslits of those buried by it.  But if you step outside of his narrative visor, you find the world isn’t quite colored so neatly within the lines he sketches, one that draws rural folk as simple and decent and city dwellers as cynical and entitled.  There is much narrow mindedness and unwillingness to embrace change in rural communities, and as Ribbit notes, much spite as well.  If we give credit to Perlstein’s piece, then maybe their economic hardships are a bit overstated as well.  The exaggeraton of woes fit the pattern of special grievances that we often see on the Right: the War on Christmas, the War on Straight White Men, the War on Christianity, the PC Gestapo.  

I don’t mean to entirely dismiss the real economic distress of rural Americans as simple perception.  The economic pie has not inflated uniformly for everyone; however, the trouble isn’t that those city slickers have kept it all for themselves.  Only a tiny fraction of the people are making most of the gains, that’s true for both rural and urban America.  That’s not a fact that will change by voting in a narcissistic deadbeat billionaire who is installing capitalistic vultures across government agencies.  While I don’t know the exact answer for getting out of our current morass, I’m reasonably certain that private enterprise will not generate opportunities out of the goodness of their hearts.  On the other hand, government has at least some track record of reducing suffering and creating jobs during times when industry abandoned workers to their own fate.  This kind of civic responsibility requires a well-lead and well-funded government, precisely the one we will not get under a loutish buffoon.     

From another perspective, I do think there are some grounds for complaint over urban priorities.  While I’m happy that an opposition has started a movement to protest the many deplorable ideas that Trump stands for, Progressives should not exaggerate their grievances either.  Let’s put it this way: if you had to place a bet on one of two people, one white woman raised in relative affluence in or near a major city center or one white man raised raised in relative poverty in a rural county, all other factors—intelligence, ambition, etc—being equal, which one would you bet on becoming a senior exec, a doctor, a scientist, a writer?  Which situation would you rather face: a viable route to success but one fraught with implicit and explicit sexism or no viable route to success at all?  We can improve both conditions, and I think the Pussyhat Movement wants to do so, but Progressives should make sure that one set of shouts does not drown out the others.

Ultimately, both rural and urban communities, both poor and affluent, will need to set aside the tribalism that has come to dominate our political sniping and unite under a single economic banner, one that demands more accountability from the power elite (I speak of billionaires and their political minions).   And even if it is the case that urban dwellers have seen better opportunities from the internet age, that does not mean they should act as the scapegoat for regions that once relied on manufacturing and energy extraction.  We should not forget that wealthier urban communities tend to pay more taxes than they receive back in government spending, this holds at both the federal and state levels.  Now, if we could make that true for the largest corporations and the wealthiest Americans, we might get somewhere.  

  

No Pity for Fools

by Ribbit

As the dark wave called Trump comes crashing down over our heads, I find myself thinking more and more about the ostensible reasons for our current predicament.  The popular narrative has it that a number of disaffected Rust Belt voters in rural districts abandoned the Democratic party out of disgust with the establishment politics embodied by Hillary Clinton. The reasons cited for this disaffection are many and various, but one of the most perplexing, at least to me, is the claim that something called a “way of life” is being lost — presumably “rural” life, or what passes for rural life these days — and I can’t help wondering what precisely this rural way of life might consist of.  These are not farmers, surely — that particular mode of existence having died out long ago, for the most part — nor tenders of herds, nor mountain men, nor builders of log cabins.  No, these are small town folk with a penchant for slow, simple living of a sort their Protestant forebears might have celebrated — simple, because uncomplicated by office politics or unseemly material ambition; slow, because not pitched at the urban velocity of trains, traffic, or transsexual license.

Trundle over to the factory, punch your timecard, make your widgets, punch out, drive home, and settle in for a long evening doze in front of the television.  You know, the rural way life.

I find myself torn between pity and scorn.  To begin with the pity:  there is a category of voter, typically middle-aged, “unskilled”, and under-insured, whose members have been displaced or otherwise discarded by the unrelenting march of automation and corporate consolidation.   Their suffering is deep, dark, and undeserved.  These are not shirkers looking for a handout, but hard-working people hovering precariously on the edge of financial ruin.  People who are now being asked to remake themselves during a time of life when most of us have settled into a condition of professional and financial stability.  Viewed in this light, it becomes possible to conceive of a vote for Trump as a desperate cri de coeur, a spontaneous expression of despair.  Such an act merits our sympathy and concern.

But now to the scorn.  My scorn arises from the suspicion that this despair, tragic and unjust though it may be, is not unmixed with spite.  How else to explain so many votes for a man as flagrantly unsuited to high office as Donald Trump?  How else to understand their willingness to immolate, not themselves merely, but quite possibly the entire Republic?  It’s galling to contemplate the many bright futures that have now been put in jeopardy, all because some provincial constituency feels neglected by the Democratic establishment.  It’s not even clear what they expected that establishment to do for them.  After all, the tides of globalization wash every shore.  Erect all the legal and regulatory bulwarks you want, but capital will always be nimbler than labor, especially the kind of atomized, non-unionized labor that now predominates.

So while I may understand the reasons for the Trump vote, I cannot quite forgive it.  I cannot quite forgive the wanton selfishness of the act itself, which can only have been calculated to cause injury and chaos.  Otherwise, I’m forced to confront the possibility that these voters actually believed Trump’s rhetoric  — and that is just too extraordinary for my overwrought brain to credit.

The endless news cycle churns up a lot of flotsam and jetsam, most of it sordid spectacle appropriate to carnival barkers or reality television.  One of the more peculiar and heartbreaking of these is the phenomenon of “murder-suicide” — a perennial favorite of CNN and Fox News.  Simple suicide inspires sympathy.  But with murder-suicide, our sympathy flows away from the suicide and towards the victims.  Our regard for the murderer’s suffering, however horrible and unwarranted it may have been, is swallowed up by the enormity of his crime.  That’s more or less how I feel about these disaffected Trump voters.  Sure, your suffering is real — but so is your vote.  And you used it to punish and abuse a great mass of people who did you no harm whatsoever.  That’s spite, pure and simple.